Two die in West Bank as floods hit Mideast

TWO women were found dead in the West Bank on Wednesday after their car was swept away in floods brought by a storm that for days has blasted the Middle East with rain, hail and snow.

Snow carpeted Syria's war-torn cities but sparked no let-up in the fighting, instead heaping fresh misery on a civilian population already enduring a chronic shortage of heating fuel and daily power cuts.

With snow falling in the West Bank city of Ramallah, wintry weather was also forecast for Amman and Jerusalem, and the polar air mass moving down from Russia sent temperatures plummeting as far south as Cairo.

Days of torrential rain in a region unaccustomed to it has sparked widespread flooding that has led to school closures, transport chaos and helicopter evacuations from homes and cars.

Met offices warned that the freezing conditions threatened to turn the accumulated water to black ice and in Jordan police warned against all but essential travel as traffic accidents multiplied.

In Syria, state television broadcast regular live reports from the snow-covered streets of the capital, while activists in the battleground city of Homs posted images of a mosque in a rebel-held neighbourhood cloaked in white.

There was no respite for civilians from the 21-month conflict, however. Four children from the same family were among as many as 10 civilians killed in a pre-dawn air strike in a village just outside Homs, a watchdog reported.

The two women found dead near the northern West Bank city of Tulkarem - one from the ancient Samaritan community - had been posted as missing since Tuesday night. A third passenger, believed to have been the taxi driver, was retrieved alive but was reportedly in serious condition.

An Israeli army spokeswoman said that on Tuesday, soldiers helped evacuate a bus carrying 30 Palestinian children, as well as an ambulance stuck in floodwaters in the Jenin area of the northern West Bank.

On the Israeli side, army helicopters were used to rescue people from roofs and the tops of cars, and some 300 families from Bat Hefer, north of Tel Aviv, were evacuated from their homes after the nearby Shekhem river burst its banks.

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